OPEN THREAD: Did Your Dad's Absence Make You A Slut?

As I've mentioned before, Billy Combs, my dad, was/is no peach in the parenthood department. There is absenteeism and then there's going AWOL. His abandonment is my story but it's certainly not the story of my life. To say I thrived without him would be like saying [insert clever metaphor about a rose and concrete or some such].

Anyways, just in time for your post-Father's Day bottled up emotions hangover, I've recently been contemplating the effect, if any, my dad's extended stay in the Absentia Motel has had on my sexual proclivities.

Wait, everyone's doesn't do this? Tell that to the good folks at Texas Christian University, who administered some whackadoo psych test on a group of female undergrads that attempted to gauge whether or not feeling some kind of way about your dad disappointing you somehow hard-wires your hoo-ha for happy times.

According to Slate's explanation of the science, "Researchers found that students primed to think about paternal disappointment were more likely than those primed to think about paternal support to complete the word stems in a sexualized way (SEX for S_X, NAKED for _AK_D) and more likely to reveal sexually permissive attitudes on the questionnaire."

I had to read that several times to get it myself. Basically if your dad was a deadbeat then you're allegedly more likely to have fewer boundaries when it comes to sex, or, re-stated in Mean Girl English, you're a slut.

Obviously the study and research and so forth are all sort of bogus, as most of the smart women who analyzed this breaking news have already pointed out. The sample size was too small and too homogeneous. The crowd was mostly religious, which could easily affect subjects' perception. Not to mention the fact that someone thinking about the warm and fuzzies they got skeet shooting with dad might not be able to immediately switch gears and start thinking about that other kind of skeeting. Because gross.

But beyond this study's glaringly obvious overreach, I've often contemplated how my father's habitual disappointment has affected my sexual resume. Doing my own mental and totally anecdotal survey, I would say most young girls fall on either side of the Serena van der Woodsen scale of "daddy issues."

For every girl who sought sexual attention from guys because their father wasn't around to do whatever dads do, I know a ton (myself included) who were so afraid of male attention, seeing as how foreign it was, that they avoided it at all costs.

Boys scared the shit out of me in high school. I was fascinated by their every move, naturally, but the idea of being alone with one of them made my tummy hurt. So I made it a point to never let that happen. I didn't kiss a boy until the 11th grade. And I HAD boyfriends before that. My prom night was spent watching a re-run of "Grease." And you know who didn't give me "the talk" about boys and how they're only after one thing? My dad. But I got it. I figured as much. I mean just look how he turned out.

So yeah that was a long preamble to a question. I'm going to go out on a limb and say we're just a smidge more diverse than a "random" sampling of girls hanging around a religious college's campus, so we might be doing science a huge favor. Is your dad awesome? Is your dad whack? And how, if at all, do you think that's affected your sexy times?